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CAVENDISH, Idaho - From as far away as California and New Jersey, on yet
another day when spring can't seem to find its footing, about 50 people
have gathered on a hill, in a field a few miles south and east of this
otherwise quiet town, on the first Friday of May.

But Alan Deyo, who lives in nearby Orofino, has only driven a few miles
to the site.

"I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what was going on," he
says. "So I asked around. Then I had to see this for myself."

Deyo was working about nine miles away, on the far side of Dworshak
Reservoir, last year when he heard the explosions. One, then another.
Five, then six. Fifty. Sixty. A hundred. And more. All day long, it
sounded like bombs were being dropped, or entire mountains dynamited, in
the distance.

And so Deyo has come to see what caused all those explosions. And what
has he found?

The director of a nonprofit Shakespearean theater company, that's what.

Robert Bethune has traveled to Idaho from Ann Arbor, Mich., to blow
things up. There's also a retired oral surgeon from Las Vegas. A farmer
from Moline, Ill. A candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from
Chicago. A couple of retirees from Salmon.

From across America, from all walks of life, they have gathered in a
farmer's field to shoot guns at explosives.

What's the attraction? "What's not to like?" says Rolf Nelson, a
"semi-retired" Microsoft employee from Redmond, Wash. "It's like mixing
the Fourth of July, hunting and friends."

"This is wild," Deyo says.

This is the Boomer Shoot. This is Joe Huffman's magic kingdom.

The shooters are itching to get their guns out, but must wait for
Huffman to call things to order and remind them that his safety rules will
be rigorously enforced.

Huffman, who lives in Moscow and also works for Microsoft, puts on the
Boomer Shoot. He saves his family's empty cartons, and swings by a Moscow
elementary school to grab the empty milk and apple juice cartons that the
kids go through. It's his recipe - honed after a couple years of
experiments with everything from diesel to Coleman lantern fuel - of
ammonium nitrate, potassium chlorate, nitromethane racing fuel and baking
soda, that will fill the cartons.

The containers, ranging in size from 200 milliliters to one liter
capacity, are then sealed, strapped onto stakes with rubber bands, and
placed in a field on the farm owned by Huffman's father and two brothers.
The smallest targets are closest, about 200 yards down from the knoll
where the shooters sit at tables or lay on the ground in one long line.
The target size is akin to folding a dollar bill in half and placing it
two football fields away.

More targets are 285 yards away, and more still at 350, 525, 550 and
675-yard distances, the latter near the top of a hill across the way. In
all, about 300 targets are scattered in the field and up on the hill.

They will not all be exploded by the end of the day. Precision rifle
shooting is not an easy sport, and an unrelenting and bitterly cold wind
will make it even trickier to put a bullet through an 8-ounce milk carton
at such a distance.

At 9 a.m. Huffman gathers the shooters together to run through the
safety rules they've already read.

(Rule No. 2, for example, goes like this: "There are no exceptions to
any of the Minimum Gun Safety Rules. There have been people that thought
that just because their firearm was unloaded, the bolt was removed, or had
a 'chamber open flag' in it that the safe direction rule did not apply.
There are NO exceptions. Yes, this rule is redundant. No, I don't care.
Yes, I'm acting like a Nazi. No, I'm not going to change my mind. If you
persist in prolonging this discussion, yes, you can have your money back.
No, you will not be allowed to come back next year. Yes, we are very
creative in making our own entertainment around here. No, they did not
make the movie 'Deliverance' near here. Yes, they could have learned a
thing or two had they done so.)"

Huffman explains to the shooters that they are on a farm, not a gun
range, and the usual 170-degree range where a gun can be pointed safely is
more like 90 degrees here. There are farm houses visible to the shooters'
left and a trailer behind and to their right. More homes are over the
hill; it's important that no shots clear the top.

A horn has been wired to the battery of Huffman's truck. One blast on
the horn means stop shooting (most likely because a car is driving down a
county road a couple hundred yards away). Two shorter blasts means
shooting can resume. Huffman has a crew stationed on the road to watch for
traffic and more patrolling the shooting area to watch for safety
violations. The crew communicates via walkie-talkies strapped to their
sleeves.

"A dog shows up every year and runs around out on the range," Huffman
tells the entrants. "Do not shoot the dog. We will sound the horn, wait
for the dog to leave, and if he doesn't, we'll take the four-wheeler down
there and chase him off."

With a final warning not to shoot at road reflectors - "They don't make
big booms anyway," Huffman says - the shooters retire to their stations to
uncase their rifles, the majority of them Remington 700s, either .223s or
.308s.

Huffman gives two short blasts on the horn, and firing commences.

Stephanie Sailor, 28, says her heart is in Chicago, but her
neighborhood is not a safe one. She says she's been shot at once, twice
had her home broken into and was once assaulted. After the assault she
enrolled in a self-defense class where she was taught how to disarm an
attacker.

"Then it occurred to me that I wouldn't know how to use it if I did
disarm someone," she says.

So she enrolled in a gun class. Within 18 months she was a certified
firearms instructor, in a city with some of the most restrictive gun
control laws in the country.

"I've been at anti-gun rallies where Mayor Daly has spoken, and I
noticed he has armed guards on both sides of him," Sailor says. "It's
illegal to keep a handgun in your own home in Chicago. City aldermen are
allowed to carry handguns for their own protection, but regular citizens
are not. It's just ridiculous. Why can the politicians protect themselves,
but we can't?"

The more Sailor learned about guns, the more she learned about gun
control, and the more involved she got. Two years ago she ran for the U.S.
House of Representatives on the Libertarian ticket in Illinois' Fourth
District. Accepting only enough contributions to purchase computer
equipment to run an Internet campaign, she says she got 12 percent of the
vote.

This year she's running in the Ninth District, against incumbent U.S.
Rep. Janice Schakowsky, D-Ill. There is no candidate for the Republican
nomination.

"You go to vote, and there's only one person to vote for?" Sailor says.
"That didn't seem like America to me."

With the computer equipment purchased, she accepts no campaign
contributions, and tells potential donors instead to give money to their
favorite charity, "which is in line with Libertarian ideals anyway," she
says. "I figure even if I don't win I will have done more for people than
most politicians."

Her involvement in politics, firearms and the Libertarian movement led
her to a gun rights policy conference, where she met Huffman, who told her
of the Boomer Shoot. She's on her second trip to Idaho to blow things up.

"Who doesn't enjoy a big bang?" Sailor says. "Who doesn't like the
Fourth of July? This is good, clean fun."

Eight shots are fired before the first explosion. Someone has nailed
one of the targets halfway up the hill in the distance. There's a BOOM,
and a cloud of blue-gray smoke is quickly carried away by the wicked wind.

A cheer rises from the line of shooters, who then hunker back down to
aim at the tiny targets. Most of them have brought spotting scopes, and
spotters who tell them where their shots have hit ("About an inch high,
maybe an inch and a half to the right," one tells his shooter). Many take
turns shooting. It costs $40 for a day of shooting at the three-day event
(Saturday is mostly devoted to a long-range shooting clinic), but one
station can add up to two more people at $25 apiece.

It takes more than eight shots before another target explodes. Soon the
booms blend into something of a rhythm with the gunfire. As the morning
wears on, some complain that they're hitting targets that aren't
exploding. Some guess the cold temperatures are affecting Huffman's
recipe.

At the lunch break, Huffman goes out to inspect the targets.

"It's not as bad as I expected," he tells them when the shooters
reconvene before the afternoon blasting begins. "Some of the targets have
been nicked in the corners. There were others where the stake was hit and
sent the target flying. There are only about 20 that didn't go off."

Rolf Nelson says he's hit two dead on with his .223 that haven't
exploded.

"Time to drag out the heavy artillery," he says, disappearing back into
the lines of trucks and cars. A couple of minutes later he appears with a
large gun case, from which he extracts a Barrett 82A1 semi-automatic
equipped with a muzzle break, to shoot .50-caliber Browning machine gun
cartridges.

"Those things are the size of bananas," says Alan Deyo, eyeing at the
ammo.

Nelson sets up in what the shooters call "the ghetto," which means
leaving the area that's roped off for shooters and moving down the hill by
his lonesome. Nelson lays on his belly and takes aim at a small
outcropping of rocks 400 yards away. He fires a round, and - with the
muzzle break venting the gasses sideways, laying the grass flat in both
directions - the report is actually louder than some of the exploding
targets in the distance. In the shooting area, people ask Nelson to move
even farther away. He obliges.

Soon, he's shooting tracers and a crowd is gathering.

"Want to try it?" he asks. "The safety's right where your thumb'll be."
The recoil is not as bad as one might expect, more a push than a kick,
thanks to the muzzle break. But don't get too close to the scope, he
warns, or you'll have an imprint of the scope's eyepiece between your
eyes.

Scott Clemenson of Pasco, Wash., takes a test drive of the Barrett's
trigger. "I've gotta get me one of these," he hollers at his wife, Jera,
after taking three shots. The line to try the gun grows.

Huffman knows of only one other event like this, in Colorado. People
travel thousands of miles to Idaho to shoot at the explosive targets
because they can't do it where they're from.

"Do this back home, you'd end up in the hoosegow," says Kevin
Batterton, a farmer from Moline, Ill., with a laugh.

Batterton is one of the more elaborately equipped shooters here, right
down to the flip-down eye patch attached to the left lens of his glasses.
In addition to his rifles and scopes and a wind gauge, he has a large
laser range finder that'll tell him, within a yard, a target's distance.
On a tripod behind him is a powerful pair of binoculars for his spotter, a
telephoto lens and adapters that let him use the lens with a video camera
that's also on the tripod, so he can record any hits and explosions he
gets.

There's clearly plenty of money invested in his gear. The laser range
finder alone must have cost a bundle. "You don't want to know," Batterton
says. "Heck, I don't want to know."

Down the row, right-handed Chuck Hurst and left-handed Gary Sivertsen
of Salmon, Idaho, share a table and never have to get up and change seats,
whether they're shooting or spotting.

How many targets has he detonated? "Didn't come to keep score,"
Sivertsen says. "Just came to have fun."

A few yards away Dr. Gerry Hanson, a recently retired oral surgeon, and
Gary Gabbard, a retired airline pilot, are among the last to fold up shop
several hours after the shoot started. Hanson flew the two of them up from
Las Vegas in his private plane, and battled the same winds in the air
Thursday that have challenged the shooters on this Friday.

"I think half of Washington blew into Idaho yesterday," Hanson says,
"and we just blew in with it. We had 45-knot winds. The landing was a
handful. But it's been worth it."

"You haven't lived 'til you've done this," says Lynn Martin of Anaheim,
Calif. "Especially with the laws in California, we get out every chance we
get to do this kind of stuff."

Martin says most shooting ranges in Southern California are indoors,
and the few outdoor ranges he knows of don't go beyond 300 yards.

Huffman got a taste of shooting at explosives at the now defunct
Blanchard Blast in Blanchard, Idaho, in 1996 and '97. There, the targets
were pop cans stuffed with dynamite and placed 300 to 1,000 yards from the
shooters.

"My two oldest kids went up with me, and we said, 'We have to do an
event like this ourselves, it's so much fun,' " Huffman says. "It took
awhile to come up with an explosive mix I was satisfied with," he says.
"You can use dynamite, but it's expensive, there's a lot of red tape, you
have to get an endorsement on your driver's license to transport it, so we
made our own material."

In 1998 Huffman staged the first Boomer Shoot, an invitational in which
he invited 10 shooters, and seven showed - five of them members of the
Microsoft Gun Club.

The next year he opened it up to the public and 25 people came. He held
a second shoot in the summer that year that included a target with five
times the explosive material of the normal ones. Its detonation brought
people from miles around to see what had happened.

The day after that shoot, while Huffman and his wife were traveling to
Glacier National Park, some explosive liquid that had spilled on the
ground spontaneously combusted and started the hayfield on fire. Huffman
canceled a third shoot scheduled for '99.

Since 2000 the event has been limited to the spring and has filled up
quickly, even since Huffman expanded it to a three-day affair.

Bethune, the director of the Michigan Classical Repertory Theatre, came
across the Boomer Shoot while searching for precision rifle shooting
events on the Internet.

"The chance to shoot at a reactive target?" he says. "I figured, this
has got to be fun."

"It's so much better than paper punching," says Nelson, the fellow with
the .50-caliber ammo who, like the others, shoots at paper targets most of
the year. "Precision shooting combines both mental and physical aspects.
Shooting a milk carton that's 600 yards away is not easy to do."

Huffman's only requirement for shooters - besides that they adhere to
his rules or hit the road - is that they have Internet and e-mail access.
He's not interested in going to the post office to communicate with those
who register.

"As with some other things that are beyond what our ape-like evolution
prepared us for," Huffman wrote, "explosions are, at some level, very odd
and curious things. Our brains are programmed to pay special attention to
strange and unusual things - 'magic' things. Explosions invoke that
curiosity of magic in our brains. A gun with its 'action at a distance'
capability is a magic tool. But at long distances there typically isn't
the immediate confirmation that something really happened 'out there.' I
change that. By creating a sort of Walt Disney like world where 'magic'
happens I give the shooter an escape from reality. This is a Magic Kingdom
for long range shooters. For one day I give them the keys to the Kingdom
where they get to perform their own magic."